The Addiction Memoir by ELIZABETH GONZALEZ JAMES
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The Addiction Memoir BY ELIZABETH GONZALEZ JAMES If the genre of addiction memoir had a beginning, it would ALCOHOL ADDICTION likely have been Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Mary Karr wrote the book on memoir writing (The Art of Thomas de Quincey. Published in 1821, this spiraling Memoir, HHHJ Nov/Dec 2015) and is largely responsible account details the author’s wanderings through London for the genre’s explosion in the last two decades. In Lit while suffering laudanum-induced hallucinations, and it (2009), Karr’s third memoir, she details how the alcoholism catalogs, in elegant prose, the giddy highs and crushing that plagued her mother (depicted in The Liar’s Club, 1995) lows of opium addiction. One hundred years later, Jack finally caught up with her around the time she married and London recounted his struggle with alcoholism in John gave birth to her son. Karr’s story begins shortly after she Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs (1913), and Aleister Crowley leaves her family’s East Texas home and follows her as she wrote a thinly fictionalized account of his heroin addic- surfs in California, falls in love with poetry at college, and tion in Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922). As drug use became meets her future husband at graduate school in Vermont. more widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of literary But the demands of working, motherhood, and marriage accounts of addiction and excess surged through the public are great, and Karr finds herself stashing liquor bottles sphere, ranging from the poetic—Junky by William S. around the house and sneaking drinks in between changing Burroughs (1953)—to the sensational—Go Ask Alice by diapers. After years of struggling, she assents to visit Alco- Beatrice Sparks (1971), which was initially presented as a holics Anonymous, which leads to her unlikely conversion true diary. to Catholicism. Karr’s prose is highly charged and funny, Authors write addiction memoirs and it sways to a distinctly Texan rhythm that is magic on for different reasons. Koren Zailckas the page, even as she is laying bare (Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girl- her biggest flaws. hood, 2005) wished to “offer a younger Mishka Shubaly, like Karr, brings perspective” (Gothamist.com) and an unflinching wit toI Swear I’ll correct popular misconceptions about Make It Up To You: A Life on the why young women choose to binge Low Road (2016), a story that would drink. Poet Mary Karr (Lit, 2009) be unbearably grim in less capable turned to memoir writing because she hands. As a teenager Shubaly gains was newly divorced, lacked a car, and admission to the prestigious Simon’s “needed the cake” (The Paris Review). Rock, only to witness a school shoot- Perhaps in response to the immediacy of reality television ing there. To compound the tragedy, and social media, memoirs frequently top the best seller lists within hours Shubaly’s father abandons and readers have a seemingly insatiable appetite for lurid his family, and the young man soon plunges into a 20- tales of hard partying and Saturday nights that stretch on year marriage to alcohol and painkillers. He chronicles his forever. descent with the lyricism of a musician, which Shubaly is, Beyond this prurient fascination, however, fans of this and ultimately finds salvation through ultrarunning, where genre, many of whom have grappled with addiction them- he competes in 50 and 60 mile races. Shubaly, unlike many selves, find tragic heroes in the pages of memoirs as compel- others, conquers his addictions without a 12-step program. ling and as memorable as any in a novel. Critic Laura Miller Perhaps, as he puts it, he has simply replaced “one form of writes, “a good memoir is the closest thing you can get in masochism with another” (Guardian). book form to the unvarnished presence of an actual human being, unencumbered by the artifice of fiction” (Slate). The field of addiction memoir is vast—it would be easy to write on books about alcoholism alone—and in DRUG ADDICTION the interest of covering many different types of addictions we’ve limited our scope to just a few books per category. In Blue Days, Black Nights: A Memoir (2004), we meet Ron The following list is broken up by type of addiction with Nyswaner shortly after he’s been nominated for an Oscar a special section devoted to celebrities who have written for his screenplay, Philadelphia. Following this success, addiction memoirs, an understandably crowded field. The Nyswaner is left scarred by emotional problems, caring for books highlighted promise comedy and tragedy, nemesis his elderly parents, and seeking an escape. Enter Johann. and catharsis, and are all deeply, deeply human. Johann is a liar, a hustler, and a crack addict, and Nyswaner follows him into a hellish year of paid-for sex and back- BOOKMARKS MAGAZINE 23 alley crystal meth use, all in the search addict once said that a true coke addict knows when there for love and understanding. And just is cocaine in the house. … Well, I always know when there in case a wayward reader might expect is fried rice in the house” (The Hungry Years). a Hollywood ending from this screen- Food blogger Andie Mitchell was writer, the book opens with Johann’s overweight her entire life. At 20 years funeral. Nyswaner’s style is sardonic, old and 268 pounds, she feared she and it is easy to imagine him nar- would follow in the footsteps of her rating his story as a camera pans father who weighed 350 pounds and across the lush lawns of the Hol- died of a stroke at 40. So she lost the lywood elite, but his deeply drawn weight—135 pounds in one year!— characterizations leave an indelible but was left feeling empty, depressed, impression on the reader. You know these people. They are fearful, and completely obsessed with not that different from you. food. It Was Me All Along: A Memoir About 350 miles away, in a (2015) follows Mitchell from Boston starkly different part of California, to Rome and back and catalogs Moshe Kasher battled his own de- her struggles with food addiction and body acceptance, mons. His brilliantly titled memoir, concluding with the young woman finally achieving bal- Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a ance between satisfying her sweet tooth and eating an entire White Boy from Oakland Who Became birthday cake. a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16 (2012), details the standup comedian’s tumul- tuous childhood with an unsparing SEX ADDICTION eye … and tongue. Raised by deaf parents who divorced when he was Memoirist Susan Cheever has nine, Kasher was brought from New York City to Oakland tackled many subjects: she discussed by his mother, where they subsisted largely on food stamps, her struggle with alcoholism in while his father remained in New York and dedicated Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a himself to Hasidic Judaism. Kasher started taking LSD Drinker (1999); she created waves at the age of 12, was kicked out of four different schools, when she revealed that her father, suffered through years of psychoanalysis, and finally, at 16, celebrated writer, John Cheever, was decided to clean up, though he rejects the phrase “rock bot- a closeted homosexual in Home Before tom.” “This idea of a guy waking up in a hotel room with Dark (1984); in 2008, she wrote $60,000 and a dead hooker,” Kasher says. “It’s exciting, but publicly about her addiction to sex in it’s not as scary as the idea of having a thousand degrading Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction. The moments and not realizing it until you’ve been in this grind latter book is “a straight look about for months” (LA Weekly). some crooked feelings,” as Cheever puts it, and to that end, she attempts to identify what addiction is, what causes it, and what we can do about it. She combines neurobiologi- cal studies with her own personal history in a confessional FOOD ADDICTION tome that some reviewers pointed out raises more questions than it answers. “I think it is accurate to say that Sue William Silverman’s memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s William Leith invented a new kind Journey through Sexual Addiction (2001), focuses on the 28 of journalism: that which makes days the author spent in a rehabilitation facility for sex ad- the reader say, ‘I can’t believe he dicts. Silverman shares her struggle against self-destruction just admitted that’” (Guardian). and her quest to feel worthy of love British writer William Leith’s The after suffering 14 years of sexual Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food abuse at the hands of her father, a Addict (2005) combines journal- story further detailed in Because I ism with confession as he leads the Remember Terror, Father, I Remember reader through his life in real time, You (1996). This memoir is emo- and the writing is as immediate as tionally raw and often difficult to the author’s cravings. Leith’s addiction to food is only the read—readers will not find Silver- most recent manifestation of his tendency to binge: he man’s story more palatable through likens his favorite foods to cocaine and alcohol, both of humor—but it is deeply inspiring which he has previously enjoyed to excess. “Some famous and sheds light on the dark interior 24 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 of an addiction, making it a valuable book for anyone with father’s gambling debts. After trying and failing numerous a family member battling his or her own dependency.